Bottle-fed joeys get osteoporosis if the composition of the milk isn't right. The females make better companions. With shy brown eyes they hop along beside you as you collect mail from the gate at dusk. We were once them, and now are their custodians. They know we are different and their eyes tell us to keep our promise. Bill came home after a fortnight away. Potted plants had been kicked off the veranda, there was an awful smell, and the front door was ajar. Inside the house chairs were overturned, papers and cushions trampled on floors, and in the bathroom, wedged against the washbasin, her putrid flesh held together by hide, Twinkle, a pony. A tractor winched the body out. Commission, told me. "1' m happy these guys don't like each other." The meeting at Los Pinos took place around a large U-shaped table. On one side were Slim and his team, including his son Carlos,]r., who runs the family holding company; his nephew Héctor Slim, who is the C.E.O. ofTelmex; his son-in-law Danny Hajj, who runs América Móvil; and another son-in- law, Arturo Elías, who is Slim's spokes- man. On the other side of the table were Téllez, Villar, and two expert wit- nesses. The President sat in the bend of the U. Villar, whose efforts to bring T elm ex to heel can seem evangelical, presented the government's demands. 'We're going to let you into TV, Car- los Slim, but first we have to agree on a set of terms," Villar said. The terms in- cluded reasonable interconnection fees, reducing long-distance costs, sharing the Telmex infrastructure, and elimi- nating the practice of rounding up the charge for a call to the next minute. The revenue that Slim's empire would lose if he agreed to these concessions far ex- -Geoffrey Lehmann ceeded the value of the entire television business in Mexico. In response, Slim's team presented figures suggesting that interconnection rates in Mexico were competitive with those of other countries. As for open- ing up the T elmex infrastructure, Slim's team argued, such an approach had been tried in the U.S. after the break- up of A. T. &amp;T., and the result was diminished investment in updating equipment. For two and a half hours, the par- ticipants wrangled, to the point that the President had to ask them to settle down. According to three participants, Slim was so angry that he threatened to sell T elmex. Slim denies that he said ex- actly that: "I said, 'Tell me what you I , ""- want. If you want me to sell, O.K. If you want us to divide it into two parts, three parts, O.K.' " He added, "The only thing we will not do is destroy T elmex." The meeting ended in a stalemate. Despite the government's opposition, Slim quickly found a way for T elm ex to offer television service, through a com- mercial agreement with a satellite-dish provider, but he still can't deliver it him- self. That will change, he assured me, " h h 1 " sooner rat er t an ater. D enise Dresser is a writer and a pro- fessor of political science at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, and one of the country's best-known columnists. She spent sev- eral years studying and working in Los Angeles, and returned to her homeland in 2002. "I started studying why the Mexican economy doesn't grow," she told me. "So much led me back to Car- los Slim." Dresser is slight and precise; she de- scribes herself as having been "the top nerd" in school. When she returned to Mexico City, Dresser and her husband set up the same telecommunications system-four landlines, two fax lines, two cellular phones-that they had had in Los Angeles. They were surprised to discover that in Mexico such a plan cost three times as much. Dresser began writing a series of highly negative articles about Slim and his effect on the Mexican econ- omy. Until then, Slim had rarely been criticized in public. Dresser's articles shocked many readers, and they helped to frame the case against him. "He bought a monopoly and has turned it into an empire," she wrote in the newspaper Reforma, in 2005. "Carlos Slim has the best deal in the world, but the Mexican consumer has one of the " worst. Mter a dozen such attacks appeared, Slim invited Dresser to his office for a meeting. She was nervous, and prepared notes. She sat down at the dining-room table. Slim asked if she would like some- thing to drink. "1' d like a glass of min- eral water with ice," she said. He disap- peared into the kitchen and returned with a can of water. Dresser was put off by his informality. "Mexico is a place of such grace," she says. ''You would ex- THE NEW YORKER, JUNE I, 2009 65